News Articles
5 March 2000
'Digger' is tackled as the Rabbitohs play hardball next
Independent on Sunday
5 March 2000
Even when Rupert Murdoch wins, he can find that the victory brings with it a whole new series of problems.
Take the case of Australian Rugby League and its most famous and, historically, most successful club, South Sydney.
News Corp needed Rugby League in Australia as the selling point for its pay-TV project, and it entered a long and bitter struggle against the governing body, the ARL, for control of the game.
The eventual ceasefire compromise, the National Rugby League, is generally seen as Mr Murdoch's poodle, especially when it proved so intransigent over a key clause in News Corp's Super League agenda - a reduction in the number of clubs in Sydney, the traditional heartland of the Australian competition.
South's, full of heritage and history, but short of cash and firmly planted in a run-down section of the inner city, failed to meet the NRL's criteria for survival.
After a series of court cases, they were kicked out of the competition, which began its new season - featuring various merged and restructured clubs - last month.
But South Sydney are still in fighting mood. On the day of the season's launch, they staged a well-supported fund-raising concert at their home, the Redfern Oval, to start gathering the cash for a further legal challenge.
Even more embarrassing to Mr Murdoch, the opening of his latest pride and joy in Sydney, Fox Studios, was noteworthy mainly for the celebs who turned up in South's colours to show where their sympathies lay.
The Rabbitohs - as they are known, in a reference to the rabbit-skinners who once plied their trade in the area - have become a fashionable cause among the glitterati as well as a rallying point for those who dislike the way News Corp does business.
Mind you, how much you will read about this in Sydney depends very much on which newspaper you choose.
Australia's most respected rugby league writer, Ian Heads, resigned in disgust from the Murdoch-owned Sunday Telegraph when it failed to carry a word about the biggest event in Sydney that weekend - a 50,000-strong march from Redfern to the Town Hall to protest at the culling of the Rabbitohs.
Ian Heads left the paper because he felt certain that the decision to ignore the groundswell for Sydney South was based on political factors rather than on news values.
"I felt deeply, too, that the decision was vastly disrespectful to one of Australia's greatest sporting clubs... an outfit which had undoubtedly helped to sell millions of newspapers with its achievements," he wrote later.
Heads was deluged with messages of support, from inside and outside the game; it was another signal that Rupert Murdoch's victory in the turf wars over a code of football has been won at the cost of further tarnishing his organisation's reputation.
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